Programmed to Chill Jimmy Falun Gong

[originally published on Patreon March 13, 2024]



I begin the episode with the elephant in the room - the Dulles brothers owning United Fruit Company stock. I explore Sullivan & Cromwell's connections to UFC as well as the Cabot family's ownership of UFC stock, and other government insiders. Depending on your inclinations, you can tell the story of the 1954 coup from the perspective of UFC or the CIA, but as it turns out, UFC and CIA were working symbiotically the whole time and were influencing each other in complicated feedback-loop ways.



I tell the story of Operation PBFORTUNE, the CIA's first attempt to overthrow the Arbenz government. Before that point, UFC hired Edward Bernays to promote the sale of bananas and to manage PR via weaponizing the Red Scare to go from the defensive to the offensive.



I discuss the dire state of US journalism about Guatemala. I go into the CIA's infiltration into the American Federation of Labor's attempts to do labor organizing in Guatemala. Then came the lobbying, with UFC first buying Democrats via Tommy the Cork Corcoran, then Republicans via John Clements. They acquired Castillo Armas, of whom much will be spoken soon. 



Along the way, InterArmCo and Howard Hughes show up, and various Latin American countries were bought off. Arbenz outwitted the State Department's arms embargo but lost the war when their covert weapons purchase was revealed in the press.

I argue that Arbenz was not the political babe in the woods or naif that he's been made out to be. Finally, I cover Guatemala's increasing isolation on the world stage before the events of June 1954.

Songs:
Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas
Chiquita Bananas Commercial
Banana Co by Radiohead

[originally published on Patreon February 27, 2024]



I begin with an extended meditation about Arbenz's position in 1951 and the state of the Guatemalan economy. This leads to a discussion of Decree 900, the agrarian reform bill which was passed in 1952. I discuss what it did and did not entail and compare it to Mexico's agrarian reform law as well as the US Alliance for Progress recommendations later. Despite this, United Fruit Company's leadership began to close ranks and draw up battle plans. That leads us to a natural question: who exactly owned UFC, anyway?



I discuss UFC ownership particularly through the various boards of directors both before and after the Zemurray era. Unsurprisingly, it consists of many Boston Brahmins and, for lack of a better term, the Power Elite from the US, the UK, and Germany. At one point, the Swedes try, successfully, to buy in.



I make a major tangent via UFC vice president Arthur Pollan and his feud with Honduran communist Manuel Cálix Herrera, whose story I also share. Then, discussing Zemurray's new guard, I bring up Hillyer Vaughn Rolston and the curious case of the Rolston Letter. The Rolston Letter is like a mini-Dreyfus Affair, which occurred shortly before la gran huelga de 1954, the great strike of 1954 in Honduras.


I analyze various analyses of the Rolston letter which allows us to discuss the Honduran coup of 2009. This, in turn, allows us to discuss the less-known ZEDES, or economic development zones, which are attempting to break up and sell off Honduran sovereignty piece by piece, as in the case of Próspera in Roatán, Honduras.

Finally, I discuss the occulted nature of family trusts and how the blood-soaked stolen wealth of Central America exists in perpetuity in New England sending many a failson and faildaughter to clown colleges or academic sinecures for perpetuity.

note: I wrote the baleada thread after I wrote this episode, and it weaves through much of this history - https://twitter.com/JimmyFalunGong/status/1755993585890054451

Songs:
Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul by Hank Williams Jr.
El Machangay, a song from the Great Strike of 1954
Verde by Manzanita

[originally published on Patreon February 27, 2024]



I begin discussing Guatemala as early as possible - the Olmec and Mayan civilizations, and the 200 year bloody pacification war against them by the Spanish conquistadores and the Captaincy General of Guatemala. 



From there, I jump to Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the president from 1898 to 1920. Cabrera was the president who began signing vast concessions over to Minor Keith, IRCA, and therefore UFC. Cabrera was unseated by Guatemala's National Assembly. 



Next, I discuss Jorge Ubico, president from 1931 to 1944. Ubico oversaw the forced transfer of Mayans into the wage labor economy via taxation and anti-vagrancy laws, which was fitting because he was basically a fascist. 



This led to the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944 - the other October Revolution. The revolution of 1944 led to the 10 Years of Spring from 1945 to 1955. I go through Juan Jose Arévalo, president from 1945 - 1951, and his apparently genuine if misguided attempts at Arevalismo, or spiritual socialism. 



I briefly cover Jacobo Arbenz's election as president, knowing full well that we will have to take our time with Arbenz and the events surrounding his presidency.



Guatemala by Swae Lee, Jxmmi, Rae Sremmurd

[originally published on Patreon February 23, 2024]



In this episode I discuss Colombia's relationship to United Fruit Company aka El Pulpo. In particular, I open with the massive strikes against UFC in 1928 culminating in the massacre at Ciénaga which was so memorably fictionalized in Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad. 

From there, I discuss the curious case of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and his assassination in 1948 which triggered El Bogotazo, a wave of civil unrest and violence that would affect Colombia for years to come. I discuss the Rosicrucian-brainwashed patsy shooter Juan Roa Sierra and his manipulation by a German astrologer spy named Johann Umland Gerät. 

It gets even weirder as a track down claims by a Sicilian-American WWII vet named John Meeples Espirito who appears to have been involved in Operation ARTICHOKE and who found his way to revolutionary Cuba. When arrested, he told Cuban intelligence of his role in the assassination of Gaitán - claims which Cuban intelligence could never definitively prove and so did not widely publish. 

The potential reason for that, according to some, was because of Fidel Castro's role and actions in El Bogotazo, which remains obscured, as through a glass darkly. Much remains unknown.

[originally published on Patreon February 15, 2024]



Today I discuss more criminals involved in the banana trade, introducing the Vaccaro Brothers and Sam the Banana Man Zemurray. I discuss that intersection between organized crime and Wall Street that intersected precisely in the banana trade through these figures. 



I go through Zemurray's career, from his start in Alabama, his Cuyamel Fruit Company, the Honduran coup of 1911 and the concurrent takeover of Honduran national debt by JP Morgan bank, and the ensuing takeover of Honduras by United Fruit Company. Then, I discuss Zemurray's takeover of United Fruit Company (brokered by Sullivan & Cromwell) as well as the decisions Zemurray took at the helm of the company.



After that, I discuss Zemurray's role in the creation of the modern state of Israel, especially regarding the multiple votes at the United Nations for the Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. Then, I cannot avoid discussing Zemurray's children who just so happened to have become scholars of Central American studies. 



[note: at the time I wrote and recorded this episode, I had not purchased The Heritage of the Conquistadors: Ruling Classes in Central America from Conquest to the Sandinistas by "Samuel Z. Stone", but I subsequently purchased the book and confirmed that it does not mention Samuel Zemurray or Cuyamel whatsoever.
The book does mention United Fruit Company, though the author does not see fit to mention that his grandfather at one time ran said company.]

Finally, I end the episode mentioning the Melville Collective's guerrilla actions against UFC offices in 1969.

Songs:
Osbie's Banana Song by the Thomas Pynchon Fake Book
Yes, We Have No Bananas by Louis Prima

[originally published on Patreon March 15, 2024]



Today is the opening salvo for a 15-part series on the rolling waves of crimes involving the Octopus that is United Fruit Company, the banana trade, Guatemala specifically, and Central America more generally, culminating in the Guatemalan Genocide.



In this episode, I discuss the origins of the Octopus. aka Boston Fruit Company aka the United Fruit Company aka the New Orleans Banana Trust. I know for a fact that much of this history has not been pulled together in this way before.



I trace the official and sanctioned history of Boston Fruit Company via Lorenzo Dow Baker, Andrew Preston, and get into less savory types such as Henry Meiggs and JP Macheca. I cover how Preston and Meiggs used railroad construction as land-grab exercises which also necessarily required slave labor. This in turn spawned the Banana Wars including an approximate 28 different interventions/invasions in 11+ countries.



Along the way I go over the Innocenti and related quasi-masonic quasi-klan terrorist groups, the Reconstruction-era wars with the federal government, the growth of Italian/Italian-American organized crime, the Crescent City Lynchings, and how it all intersected with the fruit trade. Here we see con men and mafiosi in bed with Wall Street, fucking over Central America in unison. This sets the stage for what is to come.



Banana In Your Fruit Basket by Bo Carter

I Like Bananas Because They have No Bones by George Elrick

Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas by Harry Chapin